Heredity

RICK GRIMES: “My contributions to HYENA – came about because of the connection of [Steve] Bissette and TABOO with Tundra and Mark Martin. Both of my pages are parodies of life at home with ‘the folks’.” — RG (December 22nd, 2008).

+GRIMES: “Heredity is plain enuff in it’s contents, at least verbally. If you can’t understand this one, I have no hope for you.

It dates back to when I was inking sketchy art, as was, without reshaping it. Ryan posted it on the parent site as two splits, to make it more readable, (or maybe I just sent scans to him that way); but, it is a one pager. I haven’t done many pages with that many panels, and I don’t propose to do many more.

The style of character possibly harkens all the way back to when I was about four years old and we got some sort of little ad booklet in the mail, possibly for washing powder, with a bold line cartoon character of some similar such proportions. It’s one of a limited number of things I didn’t hang on to, so I’ve always wondered what it really looked like. Maybe something like the Wizard of Oz cartoon which had a very limited run in 1961 or ’62.

In any case, Heredity‘s ‘characters’, (which really aren’t characters, being 97% autobiographical), are a much more overwrought (or underwrought), windblasted variation of any such bold figure. Suffering as they do, not only my rendering tack, but also one of the no doubt last summers we actually tried to have the windows open some, ’til yard poison or what not became the ‘in thing’ nearby.

For those with great memories, this also ran on site before with the (rare) marginalia I had sketched on the original. It was too good not to ink it, too. But as it’s completely unrelated, I have of late cropped off ‘Lil Numbleschitz’ and attached it to it’s more appropriate web page here.

For the skeptical, proof below of their original proximity to the above page…” –RG 2/23/’015

{Drawn in 1988, they did not and were never meant to appear in Hyena, alongside ‘Heredity’. Hence, the copyright date, as with many other items you may see here, is of their first appearance on the init1al website}. –rg 2/015